No Lack of Imagination Here

I’ve been trying to decide when might be a good time to take a crack at reading Honey in His Mouth, the latest paperback release from Hard Case Crime (about a con man who’s paid to impersonate a South American dictator). And today might be most appropriate. For today, you see, would have been the 105th birthday of Honey’s author, the Missouri-born Lester Dent (1904-1959).

In a short biographical sketch on the Web, author, editor, and publisher Thomas Fortenberry writes of Dent:

Dent did an amazing amount of things in his life, often mastering something fully and then dropping it completely. In Lester Dent: The Man, His Craft, and His Market, by M. Martin McCarey-Laird, his wife, Norma, is reported as saying that “ ... he was like this with every adventure in which he involved himself; when he had exhausted his interest, he moved on to something else.” But his one life-long interest seemed to be writing. After trying his hand at writing when working as a telegraph operator in Oklahoma, Lester Dent struck gold with the sales of some stories and moved to New York City. He began a very successful writing career and became for a while, with the Doc Savage series [credited to the Street and Smith Publications “house name” Kenneth Robeson], the most popular and best-selling author of the Pulp Era. After his death, some newspapers called Dent the second most prolific author in the world (though this was before Isaac Asimov). Nevertheless, his output and creativity energy was prodigious. In the Doc Savage series alone, he produced 165 full-length novels (of at least 55,000 words each), one each month for about 17 years, all while living, traveling, exploring, building, and writing various other works as well.

Such prolificity would make most of us feel like slackers.